Cody Zeller of Indiana shoots the ball during the game against Michigan at Assembly Hall.Getty Images

The Big Ten is the best conference in America. It’s not close.

I know this is Big East country and there are seven teams from that conference currently in the AP Top 25. It doesn’t matter. The Big 10 has two teams that might not just get to the Final Four, they’ll be able favored to do so.

Anyone who watched Indiana-Michigan on Saturday night saw a potential preview of the national championship game. It was a battle of two teams with high-level players, some of whom will be playing in the NBA next year.

But don’t forget the coaches. Tom Crean of the top-ranked Hoosiers and John Beilein of the third-ranked Wolverines are at the top of their profession. Ironically, both of them made their bones in the Big East – Crean at Marquette and Beilein at West Virginia. It’ll be both of those men ensuring their squads make a deep run into March.

There’s very little drop off from there. No. 10 Ohio State has Thad Matta, who is not only an exceptional recruiter, he’s a remarkable tactician as well. No. 12 Michigan State’s Tom Izzo arguably gets more out of his players than any other coach in the country and Tubby Smith has built an excellent program at No. 18 Minnesota after being unfairly run out of Kentucky.

The Big East with Rick Pitino and Jim Boeheim and Jim Calhoun used to boast the top coaches in the country. Calhoun has retired and his peers have aged. The Big Ten has younger, more energetic head men and there’s no sign of them letting go of their college basketball dominance any time soon, not with the Big East as we know it crumbling.

The Big Ten is also where the money is. It’s the richest conference in the country and the one that every program wants to be a part of. In the coming years, the Big Ten will add Maryland and Rutgers. Both of those schools left their conferences – the ACC and Big East, respectively – because of football, but will be a factor in basketball, too. Maryland will be right away and Rutgers in the future provided excellent coach Mike Rice doesn’t target any more players’ heads with basketballs.

What the SEC is in football – a dominant force – the Big Ten has a chance to be in hoops. It was never viewed that way in the past, especially in our East Coast-biased view. We still think of hoops here as the City Game and the Big East plays its championship tournament every year at Madison Square Garden. But New York can’t compare to hoops-mad Indiana and Iowa.

The Midwest looks like it’ll once again own the college basketball landscape.

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Beating Connecticut is vitally important for St. John’s on Wednesday night. UConn just isn’t the team it was in the past. The Johnnies have the athletes to match up with the Huskies and you have to figure D’Angelo Harrison will muster a better performance than he did against Georgetown when he didn’t earn a single field goal.

Maybe the performance of Marco Bourgault will spark St. John’s. He had a career-high 12 points against the Hoyas and showed a sweet shooting touch. Plus, this game is at Madison Square Garden and St. John’s could really use a win to help build its NCAA tournament resume. After this, the Red Storm have Syracuse and Louisville on the road. It doesn’t get any easier.

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Kentucky is going to be just fine. After a bad loss to Alabama, the Wildcats have now won three straight, including an impressive 87-74 victory over Ole Miss last week. Nerlens Noel is still very raw offensively, but he’s arguably the best defensive big man in the nation – sorry Chris Obekpa. At 16-6 with a 7-2 mark in the SEC, Kentucky is probably a shoo-in for the tournament unless there’s a minor collapse down the stretch. That certainly was not the case a few weeks ago when the Wildcats were simply a bubble team.